Thursday again

It's a Thursday some months on, and at five to eleven you press send on the quarterly figures. You lean back in the chair and look at the sent message for a moment. They were a pig this quarter, and they're done. You type a line to your colleague Priya, saying they've gone and you never want to see a pivot table again, and she sends back a row of clapping hands.

You go to the kitchen and put the kettle on. The Highland cow tin isn't by the kettle any more. It's in the cupboard over the fridge, and it has some shortbread in it for when your dad visits. For the first fortnight your hand went to the empty space on the worktop every time the kettle went on. It doesn't now. You take your tea out to the back step and drink it in the cold with your coat on, and that's the break.

At quarter past three the wall arrives, as it still does most days. You save your work, put your shoes on and walk to the postbox and round by the park, which takes twelve minutes. When you sit back down the screen makes sense again. The drawer has pens in it.

At ten to nine Claire rings. The carers have changed the hours again, and she still thinks you should be doing more. It's not a good call, and you come off it feeling wrung out. You make a cup of tea and sit on the sofa and feel rotten. After a while you tell Rob what she said. He listens, and says that Claire is frightened and it comes out as blame, which you knew, but it helps to hear. Then you get a piece of paper and write down two things you could offer to take on, and one thing you're going to say no to. You'll ring her back on Saturday.

You did have pudding today. It was a slice of the lemon tart left from Sunday, after dinner, at the table, with a fork. You ate it slowly and it was sharp and sweet and very good, and you remember it, which you couldn't say of any biscuit you ate in the spring.

Some things haven't changed. You still like sweet things and expect you always will. Two weeks ago you had a dreadful day and ate most of a packet of chocolate fingers in the car outside the supermarket. It happened, and the next day you had breakfast, lunch and dinner as usual and didn't think much more about it. Friday's pastries still appear at the office, and sometimes you take one home for after lunch and sometimes you don't bother.

What has changed is that sugar doesn't have a job any more. When you eat it, it's for the taste. Your work gets acknowledged by you and by Priya. Your afternoons are better. And when you're upset you've been telling someone about it, which you'd stopped doing in the years the tin was handling that for you.

Here's one action. Go and move the tin. Put it somewhere you'd need a chair to reach, and then put the kettle on.